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Sharing Links Between Music Services with Songlink

• Federico

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I’ve been keeping an eye on Songlink, a web service to share a song across multiple music streaming services, for the past couple of months since I was first told about it on Twitter.

Songlink’s premise is similar to SoundShare: given a song from one of the major streaming services, the app returns a custom URL that will open a webpage with buttons to listen to the song in multiple places. Both SoundShare and Songlink are ways to share one link that, however, works for a variety of streaming ecosystems, which is great when you may not know which music service the recipient is using. Unlike SoundShare, though, Songlink is a website with no native presence on iOS.

Earlier this week, Songlink graduated to version 2.0 with an improved design and a basic API to assemble links easily by prepending songlink.com/ to a song’s link or product ID. The API is documented here, and, as someone who knows how annoying it is to receive a link for a service you don’t use, I created separate Songlink workflows based on Apple Music and Spotify.

If you’re an Apple Music user, you can turn a song you’re listening to into a Songlink URL with just a couple of taps from the Workflow widget. Thanks to the native ‘Get Current Song’ action, we can build a ‘Search iTunes Store’ action that uses Magic Variables for a song to return a list of rich results from iTunes. Tap one, the song’s ID will be extracted, and you’ll end up with a Songlink URL in your clipboard.

In a couple of seconds, you can switch from the Workflow widget to a webpage associated with the song you can share with friends or followers on Twitter or iMessage:

If you use Spotify, there’s an extra step involved. As I detailed in my Spotify Center workflow (MacStories Weekly, Issue 58), the lack of a native ‘Get Current Spotify Song’ means we have to find a different way to tell Workflow what we’re listening to. The easiest solution, in my opinion, is to manually copy a song’s link from Spotify and run the workflow from the widget. In this version, the workflow will extract the ID from the Spotify URL, call the Spotify API to get the song’s metadata, and copy the Songlink URL to the clipboard. As with Apple Music, a confirmation alert is displayed at the end of the process:

Services like Songlink are a fantastic idea to overcome the lock-in effect of music streaming services that don’t talk to each other. I hope Songlink sticks around because it solves a real problem (you can make a donation here, if you want).

You can get my two Songlink workflows here and here.

Making a Custom ’ Add to Todoist’ Workflow

• Federico

Last week, I came across this question by Club member Jameson on whether it would be possible to put together a custom ‘Add to Todoist’ workflow:

Question: I’ve started getting into Workflow more recently and am looking to expand on what’s currently available with the Todoist integration. I would like to be able to quickly generate a new task with a set project, date, and label. All I want to be prompted for is the actual task’s text itself. I don’t see a way to add a label with the current Todoist integration in Workflow. It would appear that the only way to do this would be to use Workflow’s ‘Get Contents of URL’ action as an API request. I’m very much a novice as far as using APIs, so any help you could offer would be awesome. (Jameson M.)

This was an interesting request for a couple of reasons. First, it’s true that Workflow’s native Todoist action doesn’t support labels, which always felt like an odd omission. As someone who uses labels as the backbone of Todoist filters, the inability to programmatically add them to new tasks from Workflow seemed like something I could fix by myself. Even better, though, working with the Todoist API sounded like a solid learning opportunity – particularly for the workarounds involved with dictionaries and arrays in Workflow.

Before setting up any custom Todoist workflow, you’ll need your personal API token. You can copy yours in Todoist’s Settings under Account; this code will grant you unrestricted access to the API for testing purposes on your account.

To authenticate with Workflow, I saved the Todoist API token as a text file named Token.txt in iCloud Drive/Workflow/Logins/Todoist. I even made a workflow to simplify the creation of text files in Workflow’s iCloud Drive sub-folders.

After figuring out authentication, I knew I needed a way to extract user information such as projects and labels from the Todoist API. Fortunately, this is something I’ve done before. When I covered Workflow’s launch of web API actions, I included two workflows to export Todoist projects as CSV templates and re-import them later into a project (it still works, and it’s pretty great). As I explained back then, Todoist’s Sync API has a method to return all resources for a user account; extracting projects and labels is simply a matter of iterating over a JSON response (as a dictionary) to build a slimmer dictionary containing project/label names and IDs.

The second dictionary can be presented in a list, and the user’s choice (the ID) will be saved to a variable. This routine – rebuilding a subset of a dictionary with ‘Text’ and ‘Get Dictionary from Input’ actions – is one of my most used techniques when dealing with web services in Workflow. I highly recommend you implement it as well.

The problem with making my own ‘Add to Todoist’ action was Workflow’s lack of native support for JSON arrays. In the Todoist API, methods to add new items (whether they’re new tasks, labels, or projects) require inserting multiple parameters into a JSON array. In Workflow, there is only support for JSON dictionaries through native actions. Luckily, the Workflow team informed me that it’s possible to wrap a dictionary inside an array simply by enclosing it in square brackets as pictured below. If you ever find yourself dealing with APIs that require arrays in Workflow, remember this trick.

At this point, I figured out authentication with the Todoist API, extracting IDs of existing projects and labels, and how to turn Workflow’s built-in dictionaries into JSON arrays accepted by Todoist. The final piece of the puzzle was making the API call to add a new task, file it under a project, and assign it properties such as name, title, due date, and labels. After reading through the documentation to understand how to assemble the various fields required for task content and task ID (unique identifiers for the Todoist API), I came up with a framework that can be reused across different types of Todoist workflows with multiple degrees of customization.

The best part: you only need to prepare your Todoist API token without worrying about anything else. This is where it gets fun.

Just as I did for Toggl, I’ve put together some “setup workflows” to extract information from the Todoist API. In the Get Todoist Project and Get Todoist Label workflows, you’ll be able to authenticate with your account, choose from a list of existing projects and labels, and get the ID of the selected item.

You can use these IDs in separate workflows that add new Todoist tasks if you want to save items directly into a specific project or label. Remember: you’ll always need item IDs if you want to talk to the Todoist API.

In terms of adding tasks, I created a few variations of the same workflow, with some functional differences between them. First, I built what Jameson requested: a custom Todoist workflow that asks for text but always saves a new task into a specific project, with a specific label, and with a due date already set. Some aspects worth noting:

• Project and Label IDs need to be pasted in the respective ‘Text’ actions;
• The due date is typed in natural language, per Todoist’s spec, and also needs to be configured depending on your needs;
• In the arguments of the Task Content dictionary, you will notice an auto_reminder=True flag. This tells Todoist to automatically add a reminder to a task based on its due date;
• Only one label per task is supported in this workflow;
• The name of the task is defined by a ‘Text’ action with an Ask When Run variable. This will prompt you to type a task every time you run the workflow.

Based on Jameson’s request, I then built upon the workflow to add a bevy of options that aren’t available in the native Todoist action for Workflow. Starting from the same foundation, I created a separate version – which I called Enhanced Todoist Add – that offers several additional controls and features:

• The workflow prompts you to pick a label and project from your Todoist account every time;
• If run from the action extension in Safari or other browsers, it’ll use the webpage’s source URL as a link on the task’s title;
• If run from Safari and if text is selected on the webpage, the workflow will use the selection as the note for the task, keeping its formatting intact;
• A due date can be typed in natural language every time the workflow runs;
• A banner notification is displayed after a task has been added to your Todoist;
• The workflow asks if you want to add a note to the newly created task, which you can type in a text box at runtime (Markdown formatting is supported as well);
• A slightly different version of the same workflow excludes labels for people who don’t use them in Todoist.

I have personally found Enhanced Todoist Add to be useful to save bits of text selected in Safari as new tasks in my MacStories project. However, with the ability to set predefined projects and labels, I’m also considering Jameson’s approach for dedicated workflows that create new tasks into specific projects (like shared ones) with labels that don’t require inputting anything at all.

I had a lot of fun working with the Todoist API, which has been further demonstration of Workflow’s terrific web automation functionalities and Magic Variables. You can find all the workflows I created for the Todoist API below:

• Get Todoist Project
• Get Todoist Label
• Export Todoist Project
• Import Template in Todoist Project
• Custom Todoist Add (Jameson’s Request)
• Enhanced Todoist Add
• Enhanced Todoist Add (No Labels)

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Member Requests

• Federico

There are two parts to this. First, we need to set up a system that will start a Toggl timer at a specific time every morning.

This is very simple to se up on Zapier: all you need is the Schedule by Zapier trigger, which will execute at a predefined time every day and continue to the next action. In your case, you’ll want the second action to be Start Time Entry, which will start running a Toggl timer. Optionally, you can enter a Timer description and project directly in the Zapier template.

When you wake up and want to tell Toggl to stop the oversleep timer, you can install my simplified Stop Timers workflow. This set of actions authenticates with the Toggl API (you can read my explanation here – in short, you’ll need to enter your username and password in the first ‘Text’ action) and it’ll stop any running timer. This way, you should be able to get out of bed and, even if bleary-eyed and unfocused, swipe right on your iPhone, tap the Workflow widget, and go back to resuming your morning routine.

You can get the workflow here.

• Federico

I’ve run into similar issues and other glitches (such as Text actions “disappearing” while editing) in the latest version of Workflow, particularly for old workflows adapted to Magic Variables. It sounds like the Workflow team is aware of these problems, which should be fixed in an upcoming update.

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